Have Dog, Will Travel

by Stephen Kuusisto

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  In memory of Theodore “Ted” Zubrycki, pioneering guide-dog trainer and consummate friend of the blind. “Be good to yourselves, you deserve it.”

  The ultimate definition of bravery is not being afraid of who you are.

  —Chögyam Trungpa

  Note to the Reader

  In an effort to safeguard the privacy of several individuals, the author has changed some names and, in some cases, disguised identifying characteristics or created composite characters.

  Prologue

  People ask: “What’s it like?” “What’s it like walking with a guide dog?” “How does a dog keep you from harm?” Or they say, “I don’t think I could do that, I mean, what’s it really like to trust a dog that way?”

  Truthfully it’s not like anything else. There’s no true equivalent for the experience.

  My wife is an equestrian. Years ago she was a guide-dog trainer. “On a horse,” she says, “you’re hypervigilant, aiming to avoid accidents by controlling your animal. Sometimes you and your horse will find a meditative rhythm. But you can’t count on horses to look out for you.”

  A guide dog is not like a horse. She looks out for you. All the time.

  What’s it like? I can only help you imagine what a guide dog feels like.

  Say you’re in Italy in a swirl of motorbikes. It’s Milan with thin sidewalks, confusing street crossings, and barbaric drivers. Montenapoleone Street is crowded with what seems like all the people in the world.

  Let’s say you’re walking at night to the Duomo with Guiding Eyes “Corky” #3cc92. Corky does her thing and relishes her job. She pulls you along but the pull is steady and you feel like you’re floating. Her mind and body transmit through a harness an omnidirectional confidence.

  Why are you going to Milan’s famous cathedral with a dog? One of your favorite books is Mark Twain’s The Innocents Abroad, which contains passages so beautiful you sometimes recite them aloud. Of the Duomo Twain says it has “a delusion of frostwork that might vanish with a breath! . . . The central one of its five great doors is bordered with a bas-relief of birds and fruits and beasts and insects, which have been so ingeniously carved out of the marble that they seem like living creatures—and the figures are so numerous and the design so complex, that one might study it a week without exhausting its interest . . .”

  Now it’s just you and your dog. You’re going there to touch the birds and fruits and beasts and insects carved from marble.

  Not only are the streets teeming with people, there are skateboarders. Now your Labrador eases left. You hear a clatter of wheels. You think how Milan must be dangerous for skateboarding with its jagged paving bricks, broken sidewalks, and Vespas like runaway donkeys. Motorbikes plunge through crowds. Someone does a dance with death every twenty feet. The city is a fantastic, ghastly place. In the midst of this your dog is unflappable. Trained to estimate your combined width, she looks for advantages in the throng and pulls ahead because the way is clear or she slows suddenly because an elderly woman has drifted sideways into your path. Sometimes she stops on a dime, refusing to move. Which she does now.

  There’s a hole in the pavement. It’s unmarked—there are no pylons or signs. A stranger says it’s remarkable there aren’t a dozen people at the bottom of the thing. Corky has saved you from breaking your neck. She backs away, turns, then pushes ahead.

  It doesn’t feel like driving a car. It’s not like running. Sometimes I think it’s a bit like swimming. A really long swim when you’re buoyant and fast. There’s no one else in the pool.

  Yes, this is sort of what it’s like, but there’s something else—a keen affection between you and your dog, a mutual discernment. Together you’ve got the other’s back.

  Chapter One

  I was late to the race, the opera, the prom—whatever you want to call it. I was terribly late. At thirty-eight, verging on middle age, having been blind since birth, I was not much of a disabled person. I was a second-rate traveler who didn’t know how to go places independently. But late or not there I was, alertly hugging a yellow Labrador named Corky. We were brand spanking new to each other. We were an arranged marriage. We’d been together all of fifteen minutes.

  “You’re exactly what a dog should be,” I said to her. “Your head’s bigger than mine!” We were at a guide-dog school, a training center north of Manhattan. “Yes,” I repeated, “you’re what a dog should be.”

  It wasn’t just Corky’s size, though her largeness had merit—you want the dog who’ll guide you through traffic to be sturdy. No, the “thing”—the ineffable “it,” the “should”—was something like a welcome word. Maybe the word came from a distant room; the word had traveled a long way. So what if I’d been an unsuccessful disabled traveler? The dog before me, this Labrador, this superb creature didn’t give a damn who I’d been or what I thought about myself. She was radiant.

  * * *

  Disability has numerous implications. One can live a long while recognizing only some of them. In the 1950s my parents couldn’t imagine a future for me if I presented as blind. They forcefully encouraged me to do absolutely everything sighted children did, minus any acknowledgment of my difference. In the spring of 1961 my mother signed me up for the Durham, New Hampshire, Cub Scout troop and bought me a uniform and a flag. I marched in the Memorial Day parade, stepping in time to Boy Scout drummers. I held that flag straight before me and walked in a gorgeous gold mist, which was how my brand of blindness transmitted the world. I was legally blind. I saw colors and shapes.

  “Who am I?” should always be answered by acknowledging physical life as much as say, knowing one’s ancestry. But in 1961 a Boy Scout parade wasn’t the place to learn about disability dignity and pedigree. The scouts’ handbook didn’t have a chapter about successful blind people.

  I found it was best to not think about blunted sight—that’s how it was. And I had help with my repression. None of the grown-ups in my life admitted disability. They’d come of age in the 1940s watching newsreels. In a famous (or infamous) short produced by the March of Dimes called The Crippler unsuspecting children were abducted by polio, who lurked as a menacing shadow—infantile paralysis was a molester at the playground’s edge. My parents thought disabled kids were victims of a nearly unimaginable fate, a predatory darkness. Against this tragedy stood only human will.

  There was a blind World War II veteran who lived a block from our house. My parents always referred to him as “the Blind Man” with tones of sadness and piety. The meaning was clear. I mustn’t display vision loss, ever, for doing so would make me a victim of the Crippler. By today’s standards this may seem quaint, but then again, even now I receive enough mail to know the story is still common. Many people across the globe still feel they must hide their disabilities.

  * * *

  We arrive at self-awareness according to thousands of influences. It took me years to see I wasn’t a victim of a shadowy Crippler and that my parents’ ideas about blindness were immaterial. In the twenty-first century self-determination for the disabled has grown from a nascent concept to a global movement. From Africa to Asia, Europe to the Middle East, disability activists are calling for their rights and living their lives in accord with the best principles of ind
ependence and empowerment—educating others, assisting their sisters and brothers, demanding opportunities for children, health care, freedom to travel . . . just to name the basics. The passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990 helped create international opportunities for dialogue between the disabled and served to incite a worldwide confrontation with outdated cultural assumptions.

  Now at Guiding Eyes for the Blind, I had Corky’s large paws on my shoulders.

  Chapter Two

  Essentially, on the day I met Guiding Eyes Corky #3cc92 the blind part of me was starving. Suddenly there was a dog—a “service dog,” “guide dog,” “seeing-eye dog,” an epic dog, a professional dog, who was entirely my companion.

  “Yes, it took me a long time to get here,” I thought. But I could see Corky didn’t care about my lengthy delay at all. She was interested in my left eyebrow, my fingers. She scented the history of my clothes. She was interested in me—the present-tense man, the one who was before her wearing sturdy L.L.Bean outdoor gear.

  In order to meet Corky I’d had to suffer losses, wring my hands, and even sweat.

  One minute I’d been a professor at a small liberal arts college in upstate New York. The next I was a job seeker whose teaching position had been erased. It’s a routine story and ordinarily it shouldn’t have been devastating but owing to blindness I couldn’t simply switch gears and drive a cab or wait tables. Unemployment had pitched me in a dark wood with no discernible path.

  The Dante analogy struck me as I drank coffee in a diner in Ithaca, New York. I was in a dark woods jam because I had absolutely no idea how to travel alone. I didn’t know the first thing about visiting unfamiliar places without friends or relatives in tow. Pretending to see had been my one big trick and I’d been doing it with moderate success all my life. Sitting alone in the diner, killing time, worrying about how to live, I thought more deliberately than I often had about the art of pretending to see, how it had essentially always been a chicken game. In chicken, two automobile drivers race wildly toward each other. In blind chicken, the opposing driver is the world. While pretending to see, reality was my opposing driver. Would he quiver? Would “the real” step aside for my blind race? I’d always counted on it. Once, on a college study-abroad trip to the Greek islands, I rented a motorbike because my college pals were doing it. Some of them knew I couldn’t see very well, or at least I imagined they knew, for while I paraded around without asking for help, I was halting and clumsy. But it was the late seventies: no one had affirming language for disability, and hey, I was an unlikely guy and so were we all. We were on the island of Santorini—a steep crescent that rises from the sea. We rented Vespas in Fira from an old man who was listening to a football match on his radio and hardly noticed us. He didn’t need to see our licenses, he only required cash and then we were off. I followed a student named Timothy who wore a bright red windbreaker. If I stayed close I could track him with my left eye. I saw a rectangle of red bobbing up and down. It was a flag in a bullfight. The sharp curves of Santorini wound like a ribbon under my wheels. I swayed and dipped but held the red flag in view. Unlike my classmates, I saw nothing of the panoramic ocean or cliffside ruins.

  No one plays chicken because he feels good. When you play chicken with a disability you’re trying to convince yourself you don’t have a weak hand.

  Someone once asked Lead Belly, the king of the twelve-string guitar, how he played the thing. “You gotta keep something moving all the time,” he said. That’s how you play sighted-man chicken when you can’t see. You move. The faster the better.

  Later I’d learn this game is prevalent among the blind, since for obvious reasons many people are understandably reluctant to share how bad their vision really is. The sociologist Erving Goffman describes the dominant culture’s view of disability as a “spoiled identity”—in a world where normalcy is a prerequisite to acceptance, nothing is worse than presenting an overt defect.

  * * *

  Hunched over coffee, frightened, I thought of how my aversion to blindness deserved a grand goodbye—and for a hundred reasons, some practical, some spiritual, I needed blindness to become a cherished personal effect.

  I took out a Sharpie pen and wrote: goodbye blind éclair, the one with the shame frosting; goodbye apologies—too many to name but let’s be clear, I see how you’ve been stealing from my pockets . . . goodbye you circumspect opponents still living inside me—goodbye to you for now I’m stripping you of your sashes and medals . . .

  I heard my past in the diner, along with the scraping of forks on china and the tinny bell above the door.

  * * *

  The near past hadn’t been much better than the long past. Losing my job had been ugly. I’d asked for a closed circuit TV device to magnify documents. The request was met with incredulity. A man in the treasurer’s office said, “What if we buy the thing and rent it to you?” As if a reasonable accommodation was like a leased car. What if we charge you to work here?

  “But yesterday is over,” I thought. “The future, unknowable.” I was having some blind Zen in a greasy spoon.

  * * *

  I’d worked all my life—had actually choreographed it—so I could travel to small and secure places without a white stick. I’d attended college at Hobart and William Smith in Geneva, New York, where my father was the president. I knew every inch of the campus. I learned in a private, ill-favored way how to walk mnemonically. It was eight steps down from the English Department to the sidewalk; seventeen steps to a funny break in that same sidewalk which somehow never got repaired; thirty steps between the post office entrance and my mailbox. I wandered by rote. At a school with only 1,600 students I could pretend to see. When I couldn’t manage it, I’d say I had vision problems. Anything sounded better than blindness. I had “vision issues.” I needed extra time to complete reading assignments. One of my eyes drifted. But still, seeing me move with intention from place to place, many friends and faculty had no idea how all encompassing my charade really was.

  When I decided to attend graduate school at the University of Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop I flew to Iowa City three months early and walked the town like a crime-scene investigator. I walked in little grids. I moved haltingly up and down dozens of streets. When I thought no one was watching I drew a telescope from my pocket and read the street signs. I hiked in the stifling summer heat and worried about people marking me as deviant.

  I was “Blind Pew,” the untouchable, but I wouldn’t let anyone know. By late August I knew enough of Iowa City to travel from my unfurnished apartment to the English-Philosophy building.

  That was the summer I started keeping a journal. In July of 1978 I wrote:

  If you love others you can be brave about your challenges. I am, of course, quite cowardly—I argue with friends, strain relationships, talk too loudly, all because I hate my zig zagging eyeballs . . .

  I’m starting to think about the politics of bravery . . . Would it kill me to mention in good company how much I can’t see?

  It would still be some years before I could admit my problems.

  * * *

  After grad school I taught poetry at Hobart and William Smith Colleges and extended my yearly appointment into an extended career. What a thing to be! A blind fellow teaching literature in a small town.

  Enter Dante. Overnight the woods. Though I’d often been praised, I was an academic day laborer and “out” with the stroke of a pen. Minus the capacity to go beyond rehearsed space, I was helpless. How could I move to a strange city in search of a job?

  A friend advised me to relocate to Ithaca, forty miles south. It had a navigable downtown and I could learn it. I traipsed Ithaca’s sidewalks and followed strangers, stopping when they stopped, moving when they moved. I circled the city’s center. I found my way to the famous Moosewood vegetarian restaurant and sat beside a window and wrote poems in a notebook with a fat Magic Marker so I could see the results.

  * * *

  One morning I had a v
isit from a man who worked for the New York State Commission for the Blind. He was affable, even buoyant. He sat on my couch and bounced up and down. He said he wanted to help me find a new job. We discussed my résumé for twenty minutes and then without warning he said: “I don’t think you’ll ever find work.” I sat across from him in a rocking chair and said nothing. I was quiet as a lump of moss. Then he added, just to break the silence, that he knew a company that made plastic lemons—the ones you find in the grocery with lemon juice inside. He said sometimes they hired blind people. I might be able to sort fake lemons. I saw myself in a dark shed wearing a suit made of starlight and juggling lemons.

  When he left I sat for a long time. It seemed I had three problems. I was sad. I had to learn how to walk in a larger world. And I had to trust I could do this.

  * * *

  There’s an old Zen adage: if you want to get across the river, get across. I decided to start by going for a walk. It was a cold fall day and I moved through downtown Ithaca as I’d always done it, following people who looked like shadows. That’s when I stepped into the path of a station wagon. A shadow had tricked me. The shadow had jumped ahead of the car and I’d followed.

  I felt a brush of wind and found myself in the air, being pulled by a stranger. The stranger, my savior-stranger, was talking. I started to hear him. He said, “That was a Chevrolet. You were almost killed by a station wagon.” I didn’t know why this mattered but the car’s brand seemed very important. It wasn’t a Mercedes. It was a solid middle-class vehicle.

  I sat on the sidewalk for a few minutes. I assured my savior I was okay. But sitting on the cement under a stop sign I knew there was no more room for deflection—if I wanted a big life, I needed a partner—a partner who cared entirely about my safety.